Comp Update

Here's a video rendered overnight from yesterday. The swimming pattern comes from the refraction, which, while looking really good in a still frame, looks plain weird when moving. Tried smoothing the refraction out so it wouldn't be so noticeable, yet retain the complex patterns caused by the refraction. Hopefully I'll have a pleasant surprise tomorrow!

Updates

Updated render with some refraction going. I actually plugged the output of the pattern into the attenuation colour  of the refraction, giving the head a nice folded look. Hopefully it'll hold up when it's moving.

Also working on a particle sim for floating debris now!

Yet another slapcomp!

Here's the flipbook of the background jellyfish ropped out yesterday night

And another slapcomp! Experimented a little with the Godrays node (no I didn't make that up) and the iDistort node with noise to lend an underwater feel to the shot. In order to get the iDistort to work, the data must be shuffled into the uv channels of the main image. I also used a constant, a ramp, a radial and some noise nodes to create a background for the shot.

Render update

Another lighting/render test!

Also restructured my network and guess what? It now runs at least 10 times faster! Previously, what my network was doing was building geometry every frame based on the simmed wires. I restructured the network to construct the tentacles and oral arms and using wire capture and deformers to transfer the wire sim data to the geometry. A problem I faced here was capturing all the tentacle geometry as they might cross over into another tentacle's capture region and mess up. to work around this, I gave each tentacle a group using the connectivity and partition combo and did a foreach based on that.

Another problem I faced was having the wire sim in my asset and running in a foreach. This caused problems with my wire sim because it was iterating through my asset at each frame and overwriting the values of the jellyfish in the list before it. So the sim data from jellyfish 2 is overwriting the data from jellyfish 1, and it messed up the simulation, big time. So I had to do a workaround where I ran only the head in the foreach, and used the output to drive the tentacle and oral arm part of the network. And it seems to be working pretty well, since I'm nearing the end of my project and would spend the time more wisely by working on lighting than reworking the way the tentacles are simmed.

Progress update

Progress is really slow at this stage, and I can't really get a nice rim on my jellyfish. And I really don't want to have to light each of my background jellyfish individually. That would be just crazy.

Also fixed my wire sim today after having it hang Houdini. I knew something was wrong when it took ages to rop, but I didn't expect the wires to just explode. Turns out I turned cache simulation off while trying to fix a problem some time ago and the wire solver doesn't like that.

SIGGRAPH 2012

Been at SIGGRAPH for the past 3 days, it was awesome!

Treasure Hunt

 Museum of Contemporary Arts

MOCA

 Sundial

Ends of the Earth

Bunker Hill

Twin Dragons at Chinatown